5 Celeb Moms Who Battled Postpartum Depression

One even feared she would kill her family

(Newser)
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Postpartum depression affects up to 13% of women—including these nine celebrity moms rounded up by The Stir. A sampling:

Amanda Peet suffered from "fairly serious" depression after her daughter was born, she revealed in 2008. "I want to be honest about it because I think there’s still so much shame when you have mixed feelings about being a mom instead of feeling this sort of 'bliss,'" she said at the time. "I think a lot of people still really struggle with that, but it’s hard to find other people who are willing to talk about it."

Lisa Rinna actually feared her postpartum depression would cause her to kill her own family. "People don't talk about this. It's very, very scary and vulnerable," she's said. "I had visions of knives and guns. I made Harry [Hamlin] hide all the sharp knives and take the gun out of the house because I had visions of killing everybody. Now how horrific is that?"

Courteney Cox didn't experience symptoms right away, but when daughter Coco was six months old, she once revealed, "I went through a really hard time ... I couldn't sleep. My heart was racing. And I got really depressed. I went to the doctor and found out my hormones had been pummeled."

Gwyneth Paltrow didn't suffer from postpartum depression after her first child was born, but did after her second. "I felt like a zombie. I couldn't access my heart. I couldn't access my emotions. I couldn't connect," Paltrow has said. "I thought postpartum depression meant you were sobbing every single day and incapable of looking after a child. But there are different shades of it and depths of it, which is why I think it's so important for women to talk about it. It was a trying time. I felt like a failure."

Brooke Shields wrote a book about her 2003 experience with postpartum depression. "All I wanted to do was disappear and die," she once recalled. "If I had been diagnosed with any other disease, I would have run to get help. I would have worn it like a badge ... I didn't at first—but finally I did fight. I survived."

Click for the complete list, including one mom who describes the experience as being like "emotional amnesia."

Great job, Evann.....Newser has some awesome articles and I frequent the site because i'm lazy and have ADHD which hinders my ability to focus on longer stories. Don't ruin a great site and brilliant idea with articles like this, please, ooooo pretty please. Surely there are some more important things to write about or why not write about postpartum depression in general, I would respect that. But this....who gives a about celebs? Aaaaand thats why the Stonehenge builders DID NOT botch the job!!

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